When my house got burgled one time (while I was not living in it), the deputy who came to investigate was very nearly as wide as he was tall. I could not believe it. I could see extra panels sewn into his pants to make them big enough to go around. The SO's office had some others that approached him in gross tonnage, so I decided I could never be a cop in this county, didn't weigh enough. Recently I was talkiing with some of the other deputies and asked about this guy -- they said he had gotten with the program and dropped quite a bit of weight, good for him.

RHenriksen wrote:WHY, o why, are police not required to maintain an adequate level of physical fitness?

I was wondering the same thing. Couldn't you write into policy an ability to maintain a minimum level of physical fitness in order to be cleared for field duty?

Some do. . . growing up, my Sunday School teacher was the chief of police in Bedford. He put his officers on a fitness program with minimum requirements and yearly testing. I'd imagine some bigger cities will get flack from the officer associations for setting too high of a standard.

My BIL is an officer and takes a lot of pride in maintaining excellent physical conditioning. He's complained before about some of the officers letting themselves go to an extreme and having to rely on them to have his back in a pinch.

There's a decent fitness test to enter most departments. . . it seems reasonable to assume that 1) there's a reason for that fitness test and 2) there's a real benefit to having officers maintain it through their career.

In the defense of the officers, I will say that they have a mainly sedentary job riding around in a car. The are subjected to fast food stops and many times don't have time to get a more healthy meal. The cities don't always have a gym or exercise location for them, and don't allow them time for PT during working hours, so they end up putting on weight. It is a very common scenario. However, there is a point when a person (officer or not) needs to look at their overall well-being and take steps to preserve it. I am not talking about having the physique of a Marine, but at least not be overly obese.

Keith B wrote:In the defense of the officers, I will say that they have a mainly sedentary job riding around in a car. The are subjected to fast food stops and many times don't have time to get a more healthy meal. The cities don't always have a gym or exercise location for them, and don't allow them time for PT during working hours, so they end up putting on weight. It is a very common scenario. However, there is a point when a person (officer or not) needs to look at their overall well-being and take steps to preserve it. I am not talking about having the physique of a Marine, but at least not be overly obese.

The SS teacher I was talking about gave his force a few hours a week to workout on the clock before their shifts. The city manager agreed it was a worthy expenditure.

Officers have to re-qualify on firearms, take classes on the law / tactics / safety. . . all of that is on the clock. If a city can't afford its own gym, it should consider the cost of subsidizing private gym memberships for officers.

Some cities will always be too small to afford these costs, but all employers benefit from healthier employees. Productivity goes up, morale goes up, sick days and absenteeism go down, and long term health care costs can be significantly lower.

If nothing else you'd think the department could pitch a gym as a cost savings benefit for the city. They're going to be paying for that guys triple bypass in a few years....might as well pay for a treadmill now instead!

There are many reasons that officers develop weight problems, and the job is one. In addition to the lack of exercise provided (which is about the same as most jobs other than the Fire Department), there are the lack of meal times and eating fast to get it down before the call comes in. Then there is the stress involved, and medically this helps produce fat. Add in the shift work, and you get overweight officers.

There are a couple main reasons why most departments do not have fitness standards. One of the big ones is the unions in larger cities. It can be be very hard to get a standard in place when the union's job is to protect the officers' jobs.

The second is the anti-discrimination laws. You must be able to prove the fitness test is directly related to job requirements. TABC started a fitness requirement to meet state law. The law actually provided some cover from some claims. They hired a consultant to help them develop the standards. The consultant analyzed the job for what officers do, then developed physical simulations of these tasks. The next step was to test a representative sample of the agency (1/3 of them that showed the same demographics as the department) for their ability to perform the simulations and their fitness on standard exercises. This let the consultant say what the actual fitness standards of the job were.

And after going through all this, the whole agency was tested. And not a single female agent passed the test the first time through. This is despite the female officers who were used as part of the sample that developed the test. Some of them passed certain parts, but none passed the whole thing. And the federal courts define this as a disparate impact and will normally rule against the test. It can be defended in court, but the disparate impact is obvious and hard to beat without big cash expenditures.

So, in many cases, no standard gets implemented to avoid being sued. TABC did implement theirs, without changes as I understand it, and worked with the existing female agents to get them built up to pass the test the next year or so. I left before this was fully implemented and do not know the final results. The law still requires the standards though.

Keith B wrote:In the defense of the officers, I will say that they have a mainly sedentary job riding around in a car. The are subjected to fast food stops and many times don't have time to get a more healthy meal.

Whether we should have to pay them to maintain their fitness is debatable. But... 'subjected to fast food stops'? You make it sound like they're passive victims of McDonald's. What ever happened to personal responsibility? If I can pack a lunch, or hit Souper Salad for lunch, or order a tuna fish & fruit plate at Jason's Deli, so can they. They're big boys.

I'll quit carrying a gun when they make murder and armed robbery illegal

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Keith B wrote:In the defense of the officers, I will say that they have a mainly sedentary job riding around in a car. The are subjected to fast food stops and many times don't have time to get a more healthy meal.

Whether we should have to pay them to maintain their fitness is debatable. But... 'subjected to fast food stops'? You make it sound like they're passive victims of McDonald's. What ever happened to personal responsibility? If I can pack a lunch, or hit Souper Salad for lunch, or order a tuna fish & fruit plate at Jason's Deli, so can they. They're big boys.

Uh, whoa there fella. What am saying is just like many sedentary type jobs with minimal to no time to stop and truly take time out for a meal, they fall into the same trap of the drive-through fast food being readily available and easy to obtain. Yes, they should have some personal responsibility in taking care of themselves, but so should everyone.

And, as for paying for them to be fit, I DO think we should help them by offering options. We are already paying their salary so I want them to be as fit and trim as they can be so they can catch they BG and not fall over with a heart attack on a foot chase and we end up paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in hospital bills with our tax dollars.